Enough, he thinks. These are ridiculous fears. And he stops being paranoid. Although his strange way of celebrating Nietzky’s reply doesn’t stop. Because now he starts to celebrate Nietzky’s complicit wink by imagining that it takes the color and weight away from life and strips away almost everything until it seems like a delicate shadow, lit by a distorted light, an imaginary anemic lunar shining. This shadow is Riba himself. And it remains logical that this is what he is. After all, doesn’t he now just seem like a poor old man, a simple assistant to Nietzky in this whole story?
On the trip to Dublin, Nietzky sees himself acting solely as his friend’s protector over there. Riba has secretly handed command of the trip over to him. It matters little that Nietzky’s actually an inexperienced young man. A few weeks ago, in spite of Nietzky’s age, Riba secretly named him “his second father.” And the thing is that he has a very similar relationship with Nietzky to that which he’s had his whole life with any “paternal figure”: when he’s with him, just as with his father, he’s nearly always surprisingly meek, and despite being almost sixty, open to all kinds of instructions and orders.
In fact, he feels a quiet and huge fundamental admiration for his father as well as for Nietzky, and an infinite sense of calm in knowing he’s at their service, knowing he’s controlled and guided by their ideas. He doesn’t know any other father as conscientious as his own. Nietzky, meanwhile, has no idea what it means to act as the head of a family; maybe this is why he seems ideal as a second father. They complement each other: the paternal shortcomings of one are compensated by the excesses of the other.
In any case, it’s clear that we’re dealing with quite an embarrassment of fathers. Maybe caused, as he comes to think more and more insistently, by the fact that he doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t know himself at all. Because of his brilliant catalog, he doesn’t know who he is, and instinct tells him it’s unlikely he ever will. And it’s likely that it’s due to this self-neglect that the need for protection from certain heights arises, for protection from those summits supposedly inhabited by a warm — and in this case two-headed — father, good-natured at times and at others a talented, constant creator of neurotic excitement in New York.
Maybe he has a vague yearning for a concealed architect of his days, and so is forever on the hunt for him, in the family home or the bright streets of New York. He always walks around as if he were about to run into an almighty omnipotent father, that abstract figure he sometimes imagines as a stranger — maybe just a young man with a ridiculous Nehru jacket — someone who’d be directing everything under a weary light.
At night, he remembers a phrase of Mark Strand’s he might add to the Word document where he notes down everything that catches his interest during the day, a document that’s growing almost on its own, as if the phrases, slowly crossing paths with each other, are falling like snowflakes, “as flakes of snow / on Alpine summit, when the wind is hush’d,” as Dante said in the Inferno.
Mark Strand’s phrase goes like this: “The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” Does he really seek lightness? He realizes that everything this evening seems to be directed toward a loss of gravity and heading toward the very moment he has decided to get some air and take the nimble English leap once and for all; he understands that he has actually become someone waiting for this leap, which began as just a pleasant image, a rhetorical figure.
He walks down the hall; he’s going to consult a book by Italo Calvino, which also mentions lightness. And there he discovers the episode of the poet Cavalcanti’s leap. Cavalcanti. In this case, an Italian leap. He’s quite struck by the relative coincidence, and is literally rooted to the spot in the study. And when he finally manages to move, he takes the book and sits down in his favorite armchair. Celia is asleep, probably happy, if one goes by the last words she said to him: “You must always love me like you do today.”
He’d forgotten this leap the nimble Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti performs in an episode of the Decameron by Boccaccio, and in this casual discovery thinks he’s found one more reason, in his furious obsession and need to be more foreign every day, to take the English leap. To Calvino, nothing better illustrates his idea that there must be a necessary lightness that can be inserted into life and literature than the story in the Decameron by Boccaccio, in which the poet Cavalcanti appears, an austere philosopher who walks around in meditation among the marble tombs of a Florentine church.
Boccaccio tells us that the jeunesse dorée of the city — youths who ride around in a group and who have it in for Cavalcanti because he will never go out on a bender with them — they surround him and try to mock him. “Guido, thou wilt be none of our company,” they say, “but lo now, when thou hast proved that God does not exist, what wilt thou have achieved?” Cavalcanti, seeing he is surrounded by them, presently answers: “Gentlemen, you may say to me what you please in your own house.” And resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he vaults over it, and landing on the other side, he evades them, and goes on his way.
He’s surprised by this visual image of Cavalcanti freeing himself in one leap “si come colui che leggerissimo era.” He’s surprised by the image, and what’s more, the Boccaccio extract immediately makes him want to land on the other side. It occurs to him that, if he had to choose an auspicious image for the new rhythms his life is moving to, he would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times — noisy, aggressive, revving, roaring — belongs to the realm of death — like a cemetery for rusty old cars.
And shortly afterward he remembers a few words from a book which, just as with Calvino’s collection of essays, was decisive during his first few years as a reader. This book was Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke. He read it in the seventies, and thinks he remembers finding in it his generation’s tone of voice, or at least the one he was looking for when he started publishing, because right from the start he believed it wasn’t exclusively writers who had the privilege of choosing a voice, but that the publisher also more than deserved the right to acquire a certain tone and to allow this tone, this style, always to come across in all the books on his list.
And now Riba remembers too that what surprised him most about Handke’s book was that, at the end of the novel, the two young protagonists — the narrator and his girlfriend Judith — speak with the filmmaker John Ford, a character who’s a real person. So characters such as Ford could appear in fiction, even if they weren’t exactly themselves and didn’t say exactly what they might have said in real life? It was the first time he realized doing something like that was possible. And he thought it very shocking, almost as much as the fact that in the novel Ford always speaks in the first person pluraclass="underline"
We Americans always say “we” even when we’re talking about our private affairs. We see everything we do as part of a common effort. . We don’t take our egos as seriously as you Europeans.